Recent years have seen rapid developments in the field of lighting systems. For example, traditional lighting sources such as incandescent sources, metal halide sources and fluorescent sources have been joined by fiber optic lights and semiconductor-based light sources such as LEDs in wide use. LEDs, once confined to low-luminosity applications, have become much brighter, and a wider range of LED colors are now available than in the past. In addition, lighting system control has advanced, including the development of microprocessor- and network-based control systems. Color Kinetics, owner of U.S. Pat. No. 6,016,038, incorporated herein by reference, has developed many such lighting control methods and systems, including systems for mapping geometric positions of lights, systems for addressing pluralities of lights, sensor-feedback systems for lighting control, systems for authoring light shows and effects, systems for providing color temperature control, software systems for lighting control, and many others.
Certain environments present particular challenges and opportunities for the design of effective lighting control methods and systems. One such set of environments is transportation environments, such as lighting systems for aircrafts. Aircraft environments are very complex, with a multiplicity of hardware and software systems. Often, such systems must interface with each other, with a control system, with a maintenance system, or all of these. Aircraft environments are also subject to very demanding regulatory restrictions, such as those relating to maintenance, safety, and signal emissions. Thus, a lighting system for an aircraft environment must be sufficiently flexible and powerful to allow it to interface with such systems in compliance with the various requirements.
Aircraft environments are also rich in characteristics that offer opportunities for improved lighting. For example, there are existing aircraft lights illuminating the exterior, the cabin interior, ceilings, floors, cockpit, bathrooms, corridors, and individual seats, among other things. Today, those lights are typically white lights with very limited functionality, such as being able to turn on and off, and perhaps to change intensity in a limited number of modes. However, an opportunity exists to provide increased lighting functionality in some or all of these lighting systems, as more particularly described below.